Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone

by Tara M. Owens

Publisher:

IVP Formatio

, 2015

Overview

• Foreword Reviews’ 18th Annual INDIEFAB Book of the Year for Body, Mind and Spirit
• 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards Honorable Mention

Our bodies teach us about God, and God communicates to us through our bodies. Our bodies are more good than we can possibly imagine them to be. And yet at times we may struggle with feelings of shame and guilt or even pride in regard to our bodies. What is God trying to do through our skin and bones?In Embracing the Body spiritual director Tara Owens invites you to listen to your thoughts about your body in a way that draws you closer to God, calling you to explore how your spirituality is intimately tied to your physicality. Using exercises for reflection at the end of each chapter, she guides you to see your body not as an inconvenience but as a place where you can meet the Holy in a new way—a place to embrace God’s glorious intention.

Contents

Introduction: An Invitation to More

Part I: Body Reality
1. Where Do Our Fears Come From?
2. How We Lost Our Bodies
3. Broken Body, Broken Church
4. Dust to Dust: Incarnation, Body and Flesh

Part II: Facing the Fears
5. Angel or Animal: Beyond False Dichotomies
6. Beauty or Beast: Living with an Unglorified Body
7. Touch or Temptation: Issues Around Sexuality
8. Desire or Destruction: Exploring Our Impulses

Part III: Becoming Whole
9. Tension Taming: Embracing Our Fears, Finding Redemption
10. At Home in Your Skin: Exploring God’s Messages in Your Body
11. Sensing His Kingdom: Encountering God’s Physical Creation
12. Flesh of My Flesh: Union, Sexuality and God’s Design
13. This Is My Body: Connection and Communion with the Body of Christ

Appendix: Group Discussion Guide
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments

Praise for Embracing the Body

"Owens, a certified spiritual director and senior editor for Conversations Journal, addresses the disconnect most of us, and our churches, experience between ourselves and the physical world around us, even though it is in the body that heaven actively meets earth. Through a gentle, compassionate exploration of our thoughts and feelings about our bodies, enhanced with exercises for reflection, Owens helps us to learn what it means to be at home in our own skin and sensitive to the body’s innate wisdom."

"Wise, erudite, loving and tender, Embracing the Body will bring true healing and wholeness to our theology of our physical bodies as a church. Tara Owens is the perfect guide for this holy journey."

"This book is beautiful, learned and wise. It will make you think, and it will make you want to say ’amen’—and, more important, it will enable you more fully to live as a body."

"Tara Owens’s Embracing the Body is a gift for anyone seeking to understand how the body—with all of its twitches, itches and bentness toward false unions—is not an enemy of spiritual formation but an amazing gift from God and the ground for personal incarnation—experiencing the reality of the apostle Paul’s number one teaching point, Christ within. She makes great use of real-life stories and engaging theological reflection."

"Tara M. Owens is a rare find among contemporary writers. Part theologian, part mystic, her insight is bold and rich, and her writing is fine-tuned. . . . I’m grateful for the ways Tara’s words have revealed some of my own wounds and fears and helped me make space for new ways of encountering God, through the body, in the body. I will be meditating on this book for a long time to come. I hope the same for you."

"Tara Owens writes with warmth and wisdom on a subject that many Christians have at best distrusted or at worst discarded—our bodies as carriers and avenues of spiritual growth and connection with God. We claim to be people of the incarnation but often live as if only our souls mattered and our bodies did not. Owens calls us back to our whole selves—body and soul—and in doing so helps us reconnect with incarnational living both through the central historical event that kicked off Christian movement and our ongoing task of being the disciples of Jesus cloaked in flesh and blood."

Product Details

• Title : Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone
• Author: Owens, Tara M.
• Publisher: IVP Books
• Publication Date: 2015
• ISBN: 9780830896790

About the Author

Tara M. Owens (MTS, Tyndale Seminary) is a Certified Spiritual Director and the senior editor for Conversations Journal, a forum for authentic spiritual transformation. Owens also provides spiritual direction through her ministry Anam Cara and is a part-time instructor for the Benedictine Spiritual Formation Program at Benet Hill Monastery, both based in Colorado Springs.